6 Automatic Editing Tools That Will Make Your Writing Super Clean

Just imagine: A flick of the wrist would be all that stood between you and the end of editing your writing. No frustration. Minimal time investment. An amazing manuscript or blog post.

Alas, no such magic wand exists.

But we do have automatic editing tools, which are the next-best things.

Just remember that automatic editing tools are designed to make editing easier, not to eliminate the work completely.

Putting automatic editing tools to the test

Duringself-edits on my latest manuscript, I experimented with six editing tools, both free and paid, to determine which could be most beneficial to The Write Life’s audience. Besides being an author, I’m an editor, so I also weighed each tool against what I’d look for when editing.

Since editing, which is anything that improves your writing, has a broad definition, it’s not surprising that the tools I tried had different functions, from checking grammar and style, to eliminating unnecessary words, to identifying areas for improvement.

What you want your editing tool to do will influence which one(s) you choose. No one tool can do it all — nor can one of these tools wave away the work and critical thinking necessary for a well-edited book.

An automatic editing tool doesn’t replace a human editor. Because language rules and elements of a good story can be so flexible, human eyes will always be superior to the rigidity of automatic tools.

Here are those six tools, broken into three categories based on function.

[Editor’s note: Some companies offered free access to the paid versions of their tools for the purposes of this post, but all opinions are the writer’s.]

Check your grammar and style

Sometimes, you just want to make sure you’re not making any silly spelling or grammar mistakes.

Price: $29.95 per month, $59.95 per quarter or $139.95 per year for premium service. A limited version is available for free, and Grammarly also offers a number of other free services such as a plagiarism checker and various plug-ins.

Who It’s For: Anyone, though most useful for corporate business people and academics.

How It Works: Copy and paste or upload your text into the online dashboard and let Grammarly work its magic. It flags potential errors, gives suggestions and provides an explanation if you need it. There is also a free Grammarly Add-in available for Microsoft Word, along with a plug-in for web browsers.

The Best Part: Grammarly is easy to use and pointed out a vocabulary issue or two that none of the other tools did. It’s superior to Microsoft Word’s grammar checker.

What Would Make It Better: As an editor, I’ve found that many people don’t understand or care to learn the technical explanation for why something’s wrong. Plain language (or as plain as you can get) explanations for mistakes would make it accessible to more writers.

Our Recommendation: Grammarly is best for the finalproofreading stage, or for people who want to learn more about the technical aspects grammar. If you’re an editor or strong writer, you might find yourself ignoring more flagged items than you fix.

What It Does: ProWritingAid analyzes your writing and produces reports on areas such as overused words, writing style, sentence length, grammar and repeated words and phrases.

Price: Enjoy limited use of the tool for free, or upgrade to the premium membership to edit where you work (i.e., in Google Docs or MS Word), access a desktop app and Chrome add-ins, and — best of all — lose the word-count cap. A year’s membership is $60, but you can get two years for $90, three for $120, or go whole hog and buy a lifetime membership for $210.

Who It’s For: Anyone

How It Works: Click on “Editing Tool,” create a free account, then paste in your text.

The Best Part: ProWritingAid delivers similar results to AutoCrit, and though ProWritingAid has a premium option, most of the areas you’ll want checked are available for free.

What Would Make It Better: Though ProWritingAid checks grammar, I slipped in a your/you’re mistake without getting flagged. I wasn’t overly fond of the website design, but its overall functionality is hard to argue with.

Our Recommendation: Use ProWritingAid in the self-editing stage to guide your edits. It may not be as comprehensive as AutoCrit, but for a free tool, it’s a decent contender.

What It Does: Like Grammarly, After the Deadline is a grammar checker.

Price: Free for personal use

Who It’s For: Anyone

How It Works: Click “Demonstration,” paste the text you want to check, and click “Check Writing.” After the Deadline underlines any potential issues and explains its reasoning.

The Best Part: It’s free! You can also use it on your self-hosted WordPress site, as an extension or add-on for Chrome or Firefox, or with OpenOffice.org.

What Would Make It Better: A definition of passive voice that explains how you construct it grammatically. After the Deadline rightly explains what passive voice does, but it seems to focus only on the “be” verb, which occasionally leads to falsely labeling non-passive constructions as passive.

Our Recommendation: You get what you pay for with After the Deadline. Use it for a final proofread, but exercise good judgment and don’t make every change it suggests — it’s not as sophisticated as Grammarly.

Improve your writing

If you’re looking for a critique that goes a bit deeper, try one of these options.

What It Does: AutoCrit analyzes your manuscript to identify areas for improvement, including pacing and momentum, dialogue, strong writing, word choice and repetition. Depending on what level you choose, you can also compare your writing to that of popular authors like J.K. Rowling or Stephen King.

Price: Three different levels are available: the “basic” for $10 per month, the “professional” for $30, or the Elite for $80 per month. (Both of the latter offer a 14-day trial for $1.)

Who It’s For: Fiction writers

How It Works: Paste your text into the online dashboard or upload a document and click on AutoCrit’s tabs to see their analysis.

The Best Part: I spent the most time in “Compare to Fiction” tab, which is a comprehensive look at common issues. It highlighted my tendency to start sentences with “and” and “but,” and identified my most repeated words. I felt like I learned something about my writing, and that’s something I don’t think I could say about the other tools.

What Would Make It Better: A more accurate definition of passive voice. It highlights any use of the “be” and “had” verbs, neither of which fully capture passive voice (you need a past participle in addition to a “be” verb), and many active voice constructions were falsely labeled as passive.

Our Recommendation: AutoCrit is great to guide your edits in the self-editing stage. It’s best used for developmental edits, rewrites and avoiding common writing no-nos.

What It Does: Hemingway App provides a readability score — the lowest grade level someone would need to understand the text — and analyzes your writing to identify areas for improvement.

Price: Free online, $19.99 for the desktop version (available for both Mac and PC)

Who It’s For: Anyone

How It Works: Paste your text into the dashboard and scan for highlighted sections of text. The highlighted text is color coded depending on your area of improvement, whether it’s hard-to-read sentences, the presence of adverbs, or passive voice.

The Best Part: In addition to providing examples on how to fix passive voice or complex phrases, Hemingway App also identifies how many “-ly” adverbs and passive voice constructions you have and suggests a maximum number to use based on your word count.

In my prologue, for example, I had one use of passive voice, and Hemingway App suggested aiming for six uses or fewer — which I nailed. These recommendations reinforce the idea that not all adverbs or passive voice constructions are bad, and that’s something other tools miss.

What Would Make It Better: Hemingway App was the cleanest and easiest to use of the free editing tools, but it’s not a grammar checker or proofreader. Even though it’s not meant to catch grammar and spelling mistakes, any editing application that catches those mistakes is instantly more attractive.

Our Recommendation: Use Hemingway App to increase the readability of your writing and identify problem sentences during thecopyediting stage, but supplement your efforts with a grammar and spell checker.

Eliminate word fluff

What It Does: WordRake cuts out the unnecessary words or phrases that creep into your writing. It works with Microsoft Word and Outlook, depending on which license you purchase. I tested the Microsoft Word version.

Price: The Microsoft Word version is available for Mac or Windows, and you can pay $129 for a year or $259 for three years. The Microsoft Word and Outlook package version is only available for Windows, and it costs $199 for a year or $399 for three.

Who It’s For: Bloggers, authors and editors using Microsoft Word or Outlook

How It Works: WordRake is an add-in for Microsoft products and requires you to install the program before using it, though it’s as easy as following the instructions. Select the text you want to edit, then use the WordRake add-in. It uses track changes to suggest edits, which you can accept or reject.

The Best Part: WordRake is as close as you can get to an automatic editor. It appealed to me more as an editor than writer, but it’s great at eliminating unnecessary phrases and words — and it’s those words that bog down your writing.

What Would Make It Better: I threw a your/you’re mistake in to see if WordRake would catch it. It didn’t, even though Microsoft Word flagged it. If WordRake could catch common writing mistakes like your/you’re or their/they’re/there in addition to unnecessary words, it’d be a hard tool to beat.

Our Recommendation: WordRake is a great tool for the copyediting stage. Verbose writers, authors wanting to cut down on editing costs or editors looking to speed up their editing process will most benefit from WordRake. Watch out if you’re running Word on a slow computer: WordRake increases your load time.

Do you use one of these editing tools or something else? What’s been your experience with automatic editing tools?

This post contains affiliate links. That means if you purchase through our links, you’re supporting The Write Life — and we thank you for that!

This post was updated in January 2019 so it’s more useful and relevant for our readers! It was originally written by Amanda Shofner and updated by The Write Life team.

195 comments

Comments navigation

I’ve used both AutoCrit and Grammarly (am currently a Grammarly subscriber) and have been disappointed with both. AutoCrit offered some good insights, particularly overuse of words but I found far too many false positives with both products. Reviewing the reports and investigating potential errors as opposed to stylistic differences is very time consuming and it’s frustrating to go through that process only to learn/decide there are no problems. I should mention that I am focusing on fiction and creative nonfiction. I think investment in something like the online Chicago Manual of Style and a rigorous self-editing routine would take less time and be more cost effective. As with spellcheckers, “outsourcing” editing to software can result in flabby language and grammar muscles. When it comes to the final draft of my novel, I’d rather apply the steep fee I pay to Grammarly to hiring a good living, breathing editor.

Keith, I think you’re hitting on something important here, that “automatic” doesn’t necessarily mean faster and easier, as counter-intuitive as it sounds. A lot of these tools are good starting points, but not replacements. Nothing beats the human eye and brain.

Have you used macros with MS Word? I think if you create them to highlight known issues, it would function a lot like AutoCrit (and others) and would be a good supplement to a self-editing routine — one that would easily flag potential words/phrases to address. Especially since you can customize it.

I have used Ginger and it could not correct the sentence, “I eight my breakfast at ate o’clock.” Even now Grammarly Plug-in is underlining the “ate” as an error. In my experience Ginger is just a waste of time.

I use Gradeproof and SAS Writing Advisor in Google Docs for my essay writing, which I’ve found to be a good combination. SAS will not change anything for you but rather takes the approach of identifying an area of improvement and asking questions that force you to rethink. It’s a great way to learn and best of all, it’s free to use!

I agree! And Grammarly sure has a lot of times when it is defunct! I was trying AutoCrit because of this, and it missed caps at the beginning of my sentences. They are helpful, but too late, sometimes, you may learn that they have failed in some humbly way. Best to use four-five various programs. It seems tedious; give thought, however, to doing it all on your own without these opportunities. Then, it’s not so bad.

Thanks so much for the tips! This is a helpful list. I am just starting out on writing my first draft on my first novel. I need all the help that I can get when it’s time to revise. My problem is not having the money for much as I am on disability now, and I honestly don’t have extra to even save at this point. I am curious about Smart Edit. Have you heard of it or tried it? I have downloaded it, but I haven’t tried it yet. I have heard of Auto Crit, and of course, Grammerly. One of the Grammerly writers was a guest blogger on my blog. Thanks for your help. 🙂

This is a great list. I usually use Paper Rater. It’s free (I’m on a budget), does an excellent spelling and grammar check, checks your vocabulary use, and even checks for plagiarism. I’ve used Hemingway as well but find Paper Rater far better. I will definitely check out some of the others!

Thanks Amanda, for this great analysis! Shivani, I just tried Paper Rater- thanks for the info. It has some useful information, but you have to be careful not to connect to Grammarly’s ads. I look forward to checking out the Hemmingway app, and some of these others mentioned.

Hey, I’ve been using ProWriting aid for the entire trial period of two weeks the gave and enjoyed it. Yes, the marking system they use is indeed pretty disastrous, but antiplagiarizer is useful when writing academic papers and everything else worked great for writing short fiction.

I’m not sure that I could proof/edit my stuff without some kind of assistance. My main tool currently is volunteer readers. My main problem is I get engaged in the story and forget about editing! I suppose in a way that’s a good thing… and some who have read my work tell me that they don’t notice “errors” because the story keeps them moving. I strongly suspect they are just being kind. I’ve also found that starting at the end of the work and going backwards helps with a lot of things. And as a professional I feel that I have to do the best work I can, so I’ll be looking at some of these starting with Paper Rater.

Another “problem” I have is that I’m not really a writer. I’m a story teller – which is a whole different thing and I approach the writing from a much different angle. And yes… you CAN write an 80k or 90 k word “story.” ;-D

You seem to think much like I do. You may disagree with some points, but this all sort of supports my growing understanding that:

1) Rules are only generic guidelines.

2) Rules are made to be broken if you understand the rules and why you might choose to break them.

3) Most of the rules are very basic and generic and were designed to support the cottage industry of Creative Writing ‘educators’ as a way to get the very basic concepts imparted to beginning, unskilled writers. As such, those ‘professional educators’ cling to those rules too tightly and continue to adhere to them mindlessly, even when the writers they are ‘assisting’ have evolved beyond being beginning, unskilled writers.

4) This means that the intent of the rules may be often completely counter-productive to writers who write well already, and want to write well and write better.

5) All advice, from seasoned writers, budding writers, SOFTWARE ROBOT SERVICES, and even from Creative Writing ‘professionals’ such as paid Editors should be weighed carefully, and each suggestion should be either accepted or discarded on a case-by-case basis, regardless of the ‘zero-tolerance’ rules, based on the original writer’s judgment, assuming the writer has good judgment.

6) That is part of the definition of ‘writing skill’, to know how to adhere to the ‘rules’ and to know when not to adhere to them.

To me, that only makes sense. In society we have ‘the rule of law’, but laws are not enough. We also have courts and judges to interpret the law. I think the same concept might apply here.

I, though, am still trying to get the understanding of some of the rules, so when I break them, at this point, I may occasionally be breaking them for the wrong reasons, meaning if I want to break them respectfully and with confidence, I need to learn the rules better first.

Thanks for these! I hate it when I feel I’ve done something creative, and someone tells me “that’s not how it should be done.” And I say to myself, “who decides how things should be done? Who sets the rules?”

I’m just gonna go ahead and have fun writing, no matter what anyone says.

I use Auto Crit. I liked the previous version [that I paid for] MUCH better. This new version doesn’t give grade level of the writing, which I used. I also agree with the previous commenter in that it gives a LOT of false positives, especially on things that shouldn’t ever come up. For example, yesterday I copied a chapter of my work-in-process into Auto Crit and used the Compare to Fiction – Overused Words tab, which is the one I most commonly use. It flagged 12 occurrences of initial “ing” and 30 occurrences of initial conjunction. For some reason, the program divides my sentences in the middle in odd places, so more than half of those occurrences were false positives. The “ings” and the conjunctions were words in the middle of sentences, not the first word. I review all my flagged items anyway, so I don’t just take the Auto Crit suggestions as required changes, but it’s really frustrating to have paid money for the service, then in the middle of the year I paid for, they make “improvements” and now the program makes mistakes that should be fixable with simple coding parameters [like if the word isn’t following a period, it is not an initial word]. I just looked at the Smart Edit site and I think I’ll download the trial version this weekend and see if it works better for me. Thanks for this informative page.

Interesting about Auto Crit, Dena. I must have used the updated version — and the number of false positives is definitely frustrating. The Hemingway App (free!) also gives you a grade level score if you need it.

I use Grammarly, and it helps with the initial edits. I like that it interfaces with Microsoft Office quite easily. I’ve used Hemmingway and I like it. By using both, I’m able to catch some things before I send my work off to the editor.

Lori, the trouble I had with Grammarly is the limit on how many pages you can upload. I think it’s 60 pp now, before only 20. Another issue is that the export/import process to/from Word can be bumpy, and you can’t add a significant number of words or paragraphs in edit mode, because when you download back to Word, the formatting becomes crazy.

Right now, I’m not sure if I should just dump the auto-editor idea. I’m a published author, but I think I have some bad habits. I’m not sure if the auto-editor is helping me much.

Slick Write is a resource that should be on your list. There are plugins for WordPress, LibreOffice, and Firefox, and the author says he plans to create a plugin for Word soon. The site is fast, customizable, and well-maintained, and the author is open to suggestions on how to make it better.

Nice Blog! I really like this post. Now-a-days grammar and sentence checker tools are playing a very important role. I am always using NounPlus tool. This tool through I improved my writing skill easily. Thanks for sharing with us such an informative post. I will suggest to everyone to follow your blog.

You and your readers might be interested in the results of an extended comparative study of 20 grammar checkers I did using published sources as test documents. Among other things, I tried to find out how many false positives the checkers delivered and how many writing problems they “corrected” with new mistakes. The checkers in Word and WordPerfect are included. The test documents included more than 360 mistakes and problems in grammar and contextual misspelling (the ones that spelling checkers can’t catch) and another 360+ problems with style (redundancies, tautologies, wordiness, cliches, pretentious and outmoded terms, etc.).

Spoiler alert: I am co-author of a grammar checker on the list, but the results for it can be ignored if the reader suspects bias. Results for the other 19 checkers are comparable, because they all analyzed the same documents. There are comments about “readability” scores, about the use of passive voice (a necessity in scientific and legal writing), and about beginning sentences with “And” or “But”–all mentioned by your commenters as problems, but all long ago debunked by editors, teachers, and good writers.

I just gave Grammarly a try with a full manuscript and wasn’t too pleased. It kept suggesting I change words into other words because they were similar (like slap into slam or bard into board). The thesaurus included with it has few suggestions for those overly-used words. I plan on checking out some others for that additional set of “eyes”. Thank you for this article!
–Steve

Thanks for all the feedback. We have removed most of those distracting big ads from the free editor. Now that our premium subscriber base is growing, we are much less reliant on those ads to make the free version available. We are working on the website design so hopefully our new version will address some of the usability issues that you brought up.

I am thinking of trying out Pro Writer Aid for technical writing: requirements documents, progress reports, software design documents and WordPress blogging. I am keen to know if anyone has tried it out for this. I think Grammerly is over marketed and seems very highly priced. I pasted a paragraph into the online Grammerly dashboard and was told I had “two advanded errors” so needed the premium version. That got me thinking of UK alternatives.

Yes, we have lots of users that use the software for technical and academic writing. All I can suggest is giving it a try. You can paste into the online editor for free and it has about 90% of the functionality of the paid version.

Or, the annual licence is only $35. You can test it out for free for two weeks and see if you think it’s worthwhile. The good thing about the paid version is that it has add-ins for word, google docs and wordpress (https://prowritingaid.com/en/App/WordPress).

I’m in the UK and licence/license is one of those annoying words that has different rules in American English versus British English. In American English, license is both a noun and a verb. In British English, licence is the noun and license is the verb. So, you are licensed to drive a car but you have a driver’s licence.

ProWritingAid doesn’t really mind whether you use American or British English, but its Consistency Report will check to make sure that you are consistently using only one or the other.

What I really like about ProWritingAid is its ability to link into Scriviner. This is essential for me and it does not change the formatting of the orrignal text “once saved”, meaning that it intially changes it in the ProWritingAid for enhanced readability but will revert to the original formatting.
However, there are many grammar issues that it will not pick up. For example. I ran a grammar check on the below and it failed to pick up on any thing wihin this passage as being incorrect.

“He children were here to stay. between you and me, there was something hear. I went to the shops and brought a milk. Having gone back home. There was many things that looked like it would be helpful. you’re here to stay. Me think its going to be a very bright day?”

Having said this, the way it automatically reformats the text ( it will revert to correct formatting once saved ) enables you as an author to pick up on mistakes that you would likley miss. It left-flushes the text that enhances focus as your eyes are not darting back and forth from indented text to left flush etc.

Your review of the editing/proofreading tools available free or for a price helped me very much. I did read separate reviews of some of these aids, but your article covers a number of them in one place. I finally decided to buy a lifetime licence of ProWritingAid and I like the fact that it has a Word Add-in that I can use offline. Thanks for the excellent coverage!

I think one challenge for software is to get it to run well on all platforms, especially when they are cloud-based. This may tie in to your issue. I have been running Grammarly daily for 6 months (Mac OS). It has never really ‘crashed’. Occasionally it ‘beach balls’, meaning it can’t process a copy/paste, and I have to reconnect to it. I guess that could be considered a ‘crash’. Maybe 3 times out of a couple hundred uses.

Good article, especially the notes that say when these tools are most useful.
I came across your page because I’m deluged with adverts for Grammarly, and when I see so many adverts, I have to do some research. I conclude from this that Grammarly is slightly better than Word’s own spelling/ grammar/ Fleisch score, and I’m not going to pay for that small an improvement.
I’ve used StyleWriter for years. It seems to address most of the above concerns (in the comments as well), as
1) it identifies the obvious process errors (spelling, grammar), but
2) before it tries to tell you how to improve, it lets you define your audience and then tells you how well your current piece matches what it thinks your audience will find most persuasive. Examples: How long and sophisticated should the sentences and words be (the reports of a professional association should be a little more demanding than a book for children, or the readers will feel insulted)? Are there Sticky words that slow down your reader or interrupt their train of thought?
What I particularly like is the graphical report. It can display my whole document in terms of sentence length and sentence complexity, so I can spot the super long and super short sentences, and by clicking on the graphical representation, get taken straight to them to make whatever corrections.
Of course it isn’t live – once I’ve made a series of corrections/ improvements then I have to rerun the report. And it doesn’t correct for me – I have to make the corrections. But my readership seems to find the results impressive.
By the way, none of the other tools are live either.

This may be not what you meant by ‘live’ (Grammarly does not correct my Scrivener or iBooks Author docs — I have to repaste), and I don’t want to sound like a cheerleader fanboy for Grammarly, but it is ‘live’ in one particular way, which is that it is ‘live’ for me right now, suggesting corrections for this very paragraph I am writing, right now.

That is a documented feature, but one often overlooked by reviewers. Anything I write on the web is ‘live’ corrected by Grammarly, which can be very helpful.

I use PerfectIt for cleaning up copy (not grammar, but things like acronyms that come before definitions, table numbers that aren’t correct, double spaces after periods, hyphenation consistency, etc.) and like it a lot. It’s a MS Word add-in. I forget the price.

While I read about ‘econometric algorithms’ and software writing entire books I still must type all I am then blamed for. Doing it the pretty old-fashioned way, though on a notebook and no longer with a typewriter or handwriting, seemed the way it is to me.

I tested software, and online software embedded into websites. I found the time learning to handle them is often better invested into either writing or researching, as those skills remain with the author.

Still thanks for your overview, it is, besides others, an appreciated shortcut to restart research!